Sea of troubles

As a journalist, I’m trained to look for stories in many places and consider them equally important. As a resident of planet Earth, I can’t help but think there is only one story that matters on an existential level: climate change.

I’m old enough that it won’t affect me greatly, but I worry for my children, for their generation and the ones to follow. As our cover feature in this issue shows (see “California submerged,” page 14), scientists are convinced rising sea levels over the next 70 years or so will have often devastating impacts—from flooding, in particular—on the California coastline and the millions of people who live there.

And, compared to people elsewhere on the planet, Californians will have it relatively easy. Much of Bangladesh will be underwater, and certain Pacific island nations will disappear altogether.

Sea-level rise is only one of the many terrible consequences of climate change. Drought and desertification will continue to spread, forcing farmers in the poorer nations to leave the land seeking refuge and fostering blood-soaked tribal conflicts such as the Syrian civil war. Fish populations, on which billions of people depend for food, will decline and, in many cases, disappear altogether, along with the coral reefs that serve as their breeding nurseries. Thousands of plant and animal species will die off.

The scientific community is nearly unanimous in its conviction that we’ve reached a tipping point beyond which it will be impossible to forestall climate change. It’s certainly no time to leave the Paris climate accord, as President Donald Trump foolishly wants to do. An international effort to curb global warming is our only hope for sustaining life on our planet.